You can temporarily remove protection from a replicated virtual machine without removing it from its protection group.

Removing protection deletes the placeholder virtual machine on the recovery site. If you remove protection from a virtual machine, the states of the virtual machine and the protection group are set to Not Configured. Running a recovery plan that contains the protection group succeeds, but Site Recovery Manager does not recover the virtual machines that are in the Not Configured state.

You might remove protection from a virtual machine for different reasons:

  • You use vSphere Replication and you want to reconfigure a protected virtual machine. You can remove protection while you reconfigure the virtual machine, so that ongoing Site Recovery Manager test or real recoveries are not affected by the changes. For example, if you add devices to a virtual machine and run a recovery before you configure vSphere Replication on the new devices, the recovery shows errors if you do not remove protection from the virtual machine.
  • You use array-based replication, and someone moves to a replicated datastore a virtual machine that you do not want to protect. If you remove protection from the virtual machine, the protection group still shows the Not Configured state, but test recovery and real recovery continue to succeed.
  • You use array-based replication and a virtual machine has devices that are stored on an unreplicated datastore. You can remove protection from the virtual machine so that recoveries succeed for all of the other virtual machines in the group while you relocate the device files.
  • In array-based replication, a distinction exists between the Site Recovery Manager protection of a virtual machine and the Site Recovery Manager storage management for that virtual machine. If you remove protection from a virtual machine, Site Recovery Manager no longer recovers the virtual machine, but it continues to monitor and manage the storage of the virtual machine files.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Web Client, click Site Recovery > Protection Groups.
  2. Select a protection group and select Related Objects > Virtual Machines.
  3. Right-click a virtual machine and select Remove Protection.
  4. Click Yes to confirm the removal of protection from the virtual machine.